Drivers are probably the most common issue across the majority of application virtualization solutions on the market today. Particularly those with a focus on Isolation, such as App-V! Many drivers run in the Kernel level and so, they cannot run correctly when isolated from the system. However in some cases, vendors application installs will contain a dedicated driver install which could be extracted out and installed via a machine script. It’s also possible, if the vendor install media is a single MSI, the driver may be contained in it’s own feature which could be installed by itself. These of course are the best case scenario. For some more great detail check out this article HERE
Unfortunately, vendors are pretty inconsistent with how the package drivers. I’ve come across quite a few different variations of drivers over the last few years and I have my own methodology for trying to deal with these. I published a more detailed post on this which can be found: HERE
In the graph above you can see, if your application has drivers you can try to extract these. Personally, I’d suggest setting a time limit on yourself, you could really get trapped down the rabbit hole trying to get the drivers extracted and may not be worth the time spent but if you do get them extracted. Install the drivers via a machine script and test. If the test results in Failure, go ahead and deploy as a local install. If the app works with the drivers extracted. Go with App-V. Otherwise look at the alternatives e.g. Local insall or XenApp\RDS
